A blog about Reasoning, Argumentation, and Informal Logic

Deep Disagreement: A Lesson from the Jewish Tradition

Mulling over deep disagreement (again) I came across this nice little piece by David Suissa at the Huffington Post from a little over a year ago. In it he talks about the traditional Jewish narrative of the houses of Shammai and Hillel, who differed over how to interpret the Jewish law (Shammai insisted on strict adherence, while Hillel counseled in favor of compassion):

This idea of looking at more than one “truth” is at the heart of the epic debate in the Talmud between the house of Shammai, which represents the strict, uncompromising voice of Jewish law, and the house of Hillel, which represents the more lenient voice.

Rabbi Moti Bar-Or, who runs Kolot, a bridge-building Torah study institution in Israel, explained to me that “the uniqueness of Hillel is that he truly believes there is validity in the Shammai approach, although he totally disagrees with him.”
In Shammai’s world, there’s “no room for pluralism” because it’s the world of “true or false.” It is Hillel’s ability to see the other side, Bar-Or says, that makes Judaism follow his approach today — not the fact that he was “smarter or right.”

As the Talmud explains in Tractate Eruvin 13b: “On what basis did the School of Hillel merit that the law should be determined in accordance with its positions? Because they were gentle and kind, and they studied their own rulings plus those of the School of Shammai. They were even so humble as to place the words of the School of Shammai before their own.”

For many Jews, myself included, the overriding lesson in the Hillel-Shammai dispute is that despite their intense disagreements, they never split up.

Like the Talmud says in Tractate Yevamot 14b: “Beth Shammai did not abstain from marrying women of the families of Beth Hillel, nor did Beth Hillel refrain from marrying those of Beth Shammai, or eat with one another. This is to teach you that they showed love and friendship toward one another.”

Perhaps this love and friendship was rooted in the fact that they argued, as it says in Pirkei Avot, “for the sake of heaven.”

Now, apologies to my Jewish friends if I mess the story up a little, but it there are some things in this narrative that strike me as helpful in strategizing about how to handle deep disagreement: the importance of seeing the other side, for example, and of maintaining what relationships there are wherever possible–even through routine functions like taking meals. Shammai and Hillel don’t let their disputes get in the way of their eating together or of marriages between their houses. And Hillel eventually wins out because its philosophy of understanding the other turns out to be a better plan for longevity than Shammai’s more doctrinal approach. Mundane things like eating together may not sound like they have all that much to do with substantive differences around the interpretation of law, but certainly they go some way to reinforcing the common humanity of both parties in the eyes of their interlocutors.

There are limitations to the applicability of the tale however, for the dispute between the houses occurs within a well-defined community of common belief. If we were following Fogelin’s description of deep disagreement, no deep disagreements would really be possible for Shammai and Hllel. (Fogelin 1985) They simply share too much common ground. That they both argue “for the sake of heaven” also suggests that their differences are really about means more than ends. This isn’t a case of competing comprehensive doctrines, in Rawls’s sense. It’s case of how best to advance a shared cause, or perhaps of what course of action best represents the true spirit of their shared vision of the good life. When we think of deep disagreements we typically don’t think of them as coming equipped with such resources for resolution.

So what do we make of the story?

It seems to me that the lesson of emphasizing our common humanity is a good one. We share much more than we often realize with one another, and acknowledging that (or even acting on it in small ways like breaking bread with one another) seems to me to be a potentially powerful way of attacking an apparent deep disagreement. I say “apparent” because reflecting on this point leads me to wonder if there really are Fogelin-type deep disagreements at all, where the parties share absolutely nothing in common to which appeal could be made. Surely it’s a matter of degree. It cannot be that the parties share nothing–at the very least they share a language and a cultural framework (or meta-framework) that makes the verbal encounter between them possible. Beyond that, the parties are human beings, with the same strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, fears, and basic capacities. The depth of a deep disagreement then is more about how inflamed differences (real or imagined) overshadow the truth about how much is held in common. This maybe is the best lesson for those of us working on deep disagreement to draw from the story of Shammai and Hillel. Though they differed, they did not let their differences become inflamed to the point of obscuring those beliefs, practices, and commitments that they held in common.

If this is right, then the problem of deep disagreement may be more one of recognizing and treating ideological inflammations than about leaping over unbridgeable chasms, or finding long ways around the differences that seem to divide us. Though some may see this as naive, and while I do think that deep disagreements will vary in intensity, I think there’s something very useful in thinking of them as disorders, as aberrations that require treatment–not so much as manichean struggles for supremacy between diametrically opposed life-worlds. As Fogelin himself acknowledges: “A person participates in a variety of forms of life that overlap and criss-cross in a variety of ways.” (Fogelin, p.6) He even goes so far as to say that this might mean that deep disagreements aren’t so common, though he insists that they do happen and are irresolvable.

For my part, I cannot help but wonder what the result would be if we counted the “form of life” we share in common just as human beings among those in which we participate. (Note that this is not the same thing as appealing to a common rationality.) Granted the form of life we share in terms of our common humanity is not always the most interesting subject, but it is always there–albeit invisibly because of its omnipresence. We are not so different as we like to believe. What happens if we move this proposition to the foreground rather than leaving it in the background?

Few commentators have suggested such a move, preferring instead to argue that rationality survives deep disagreement and provides grounds for their resolution. Richard Friemann’s suggestion (following Michael Gilbert) that deep disagreements be re-cast as emotional rather than rational conflicts is interesting and close in spirit to what I’m considering here, but differs rather significantly too as it doesn’t draw on the idea that attending to widely shared commonalities in human life might be a resource for handling apparent deep disagreements. (Friemann 2005) Friemann diagnoses the problem differently and, accordingly, proposes a treatment he sees as fitting. While I like the idea that what is needed is something more akin to therapy than to engineering, I don’t share Friemann’s diagnosis of the problem inherent in deep disagreements.

What I’m suggesting (perhaps somewhat radically) is that maybe deep disagreements aren’t so deep after all–that the problem may be somewhat (if understandably) over-exaggerated. If we attend to those overarching forms of life we share, might we not become able to re-imagine the task of dealing with deep disagreements so that we approach them as healers treating an illness of ideological inflammation rather than as engineers trying to bridge a doctrinal abyss?